Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Didja ever wonder...

...just who in the heck would go to Meijer at 12:30 at night to buy tennis balls and nothing else?? In the middle of winter??

Well, wonder no longer.



Why? You want to know why someone would go buy tennis balls and nothing else in the middle of the night? Boy you're nosy.

Well, maybe, juuuuust maybe, it's because way back in September she found a great deal on a down filled parka for her daughter on Land's End Overstocks. And perhaps that lovely down-filled parka was starting to look a little...dingy after several snowfalls and months of being worn to school every. single day. And maybe this mommy looked at the cleaning instructions and saw, to her delight that it said "Machine wash warm, tumble dry low with clean tennis balls."

However, maybe this particular mommy is a little dorky and thought to herself, "Well, I'm sure if I have other stuff in the dryer with it, it will be fine." So, after 45 minutes in the dryer, she removes all of the snow pants, coats, mittens socks, etc, that are toasty arm and clean and then she pulls out said parka. Which is now really just a coat-shaped sack of wet feathers.

So, the mommy begins a mad search of the house for tennis balls. All the while knowing that neither Pete Sampras nor Martina Navratilova live in or near her home. Meanwhile, B2B, who has been on the phone with the mommy, is laughing her ass off (which is really not a nice thing to do to someone who is flying all the way down to see you TWICE just because you decided to get married!).

By now it is 12:30 and she gets off the phone, puts on her sweats, sneakers, her parka (did I mention how freakin' cold it is??) and hat and runs to Meijers to purchase a dozen tennis balls. And nothing else. Why yes, the check-out lady did give her a strange look. How did you know?

She arrives home a few moments later, and with great relief, takes the parka from the washer (where she ran it back through a rinse & spin cycle to separate any feathers that might have dried together) and puts it in the dryer with all twelve tennis balls. Can you say cacophony? She then sits down for a moment, thinking that this will soon be over, but something tells her to wait before going to bed.

Did you know that some newer dryers have a sensor that tells when the clothes are supposedly dry? Well, this mommy's dryer has one. And it kept shutting off, only the coat wasn't dry so much as a mass of warm feathers. So every few minutes for about three hours, she had to go into the laundry room, pull the coat out, fluff the feathers out and restart the dryer. Finally, at about 4:30, the coat was back to its original fluffiness. And SugarPlum could safely and warmly walk to school this morning. And the mommy could finally go to bed.

And of course this was the first night that all three of her children have slept peacefully all night in weeks. Who ever said that God doesn't have a sense of humor? *yawn*

But the mommy blames you, internet! Why, oh why didn't you warn her? Why didn't you tell her that down coats are a bitch to dry so take it to the dry cleaners for crying out loud and short of that at least make sure it's in the dryer (with tennis balls!) by dinnertime so that you can get to bed at a decent time but honestly just don't buy a down parka in the first place because they are nothing but a big pain in the ass!

But really, internet. You have to watch those run-on sentences. That's just embarrassing.

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